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You may not have noticed while playing Bethesda's Fallout or Elder Scrolls titles over the years, but none of the games from those series include ladders as a means of getting to higher places.

Bethesda Game Director Todd Howard admitting during a panel at Quakecon today that one of the gameplay features the studio continues to cut game after game is the inclusion of ladders for players to climb.

"Play our game; find a ladder that you can use. We don't have them," he said.

Where are the ladders?!?

Howard explained the primary reason for not being able to include ladders into environments is due to their engine, saying ladders caused problems for character AI.

"One day, we tried to figure out why we wanted ladders so bad because we don't really need them. It just felt like we're game development pussies because we can't do ladders."

I think that's pretty funny. I never really realized that there are in fact no ladders in Fallout 3 or Oblivion. Everything is staircases. I guess ladders can't survive the apocalypse or weren't invented during the medieval times.

Figured this wasn't really "news" so I posted it here. Rather funny though.